Step 0 - Decide what to contribute

It could be a bug or feature that you want aka starch your itch. It could a bug fix in which cause check github issue tracker for existing issues & see if you can fix anyone of them and send a Pull Request. It could be removing a warning from test. Or it would contributing documentation.

Step 1 - Fork & Change

This is rather simple but you must know how to use git - the popular distributed version control system. If you don't then please following this guide closely & read multiple times until you understand.

Goto rails page on github & click the "Fork" button on the top. requires github account. so register if not already done. Its free!

You've successfully forked rails, but so far it only exists on GitHub. To be able to work on the project, you will need to clone it to your local machine.

git clone https://github.com/your_github_username_goes_here/rails.git
# Clones your fork of the repo into the current directory in terminal

In the process of the rebase, it may discover conflicts. In that case it will stop and allow you to fix the conflicts. After fixing conflicts, use git add . to update the index with those contents, and then just run: